‘A campaign of almost pathological dishonesty’

8. Also on contraception access, Romney said, “[The Obama administration is] requiring the Catholic Church to provide for its employees and its various enterprises health care insurance that would include birth control, sterilization and the morning-after pill. Unbelievable.”

9. On the Affordable Care Act, Romney said, “I will repeal Obamacare for a lot of reasons. One, I don’t want to spend another trillion dollars… Number two, I don’t believe the federal government should cut Medicare by some $500 billion.”

11. On international affairs, Romney argued about the president, “He decided to give Russia their number one foreign policy objective – removal of our missile defense sites from Eastern Europe – and got nothing in return.”

Santorum left the Senate in 2006 – three years before Sotomayor’s confirmation. [Update: It looks like the Romney camp played fast and loose on this one, showing Sotomayor with President Obama in 2009 when she was nominated for the Supreme Court, but counting Santorum’s vote when Sotomayor was a lower-court nominee. The implication for viewers is that Santorum backed Sotomayor for the high court, which is not true, when he and other Republicans did support her confirmation to a lower court.]

Foreign Policy columnist Michael Cohen noted yesterday that he understands that “politicians mislead and occasionally fib,” but added, “[H]onestly, I’ve never seen anyone do it as brazenly as Mitt Romney.”

With each passing week, I find it harder to disagree with such a sentiment.